Parametric plastic Skiffy spacer

grabcad

Yesterday, I was drawing a simple spacer in SolidWorks to the specifications of a Skiffy part. It’s not much work, but I think I’ve done this for about 20 times. 2 circles, put dimensions on them, extrude… I decided this was the last time I was going to do this. Let’s make a parametric file from the Skiffy catalogue and put it in my Solidworks Toolbox. Although Skiffy is one of the leading suppliers of plastic tidbits, they don’t have 3D-CAD models of their parts. So I had to scrape the dimensions from their site, put them in a spreadsheet, and load them into SolidWorks. I learned quite a lot of stuff from this, so I’ll also share the process: Get the HTML-source of the table from Skiffy’s web site and feed that into this handy-dandy tool. Save the CSV as a textfile and open it in OpenOffice (or Excel, if you’re into that). Use Find/replace and some regex to clean up the table and fix “,”or”.”-problems. Get this nice plugin for SW and install it (you have to “buy” it for free to download), or use SW’s native Design Table tool (but you’ll need to have Excel installed, which I didn’t) SPN’s tool works by right clicking in the model space and selecting Add/edit ConfigurationDesigner Spreadsheet, which took some time to figure out. ConfigurationDesigner didn’t recognize new dimensions automatically, so I had to add them manually by their name (e.g. D1@Sketch1) Add your data to the sheet. Click Update to model and get some tea; with ±400 configs, this takes a while. I’m probably not the only one using Skiffy’s awesome products on a regular basis, so I’ll share the part with you. It has mate-references for easy usage in assemblies, and the complete part number and description per config. Enjoy!